Su Muqing woke up in a state of gnawing hunger.
The hollow feeling in her stomach pulled her consciousness from the haze. Her nostrils were filled with the scent of cheap soap mixed with damp wood, and the room was stiflingly hot. When she opened her eyes, she saw yellowed old newspapers plastered over the low ceiling.
A flood of memories that didn’t belong to her surged into her mind.
1968, Shanghai, Machinery Factory staff dormitory. Li Zhaodi, eighteen years old, eldest daughter of Li Jianguo, a Grade 2 fitter at the Shanghai Machinery Factory, and Wang Xiujuan, a textile worker.
She also had a twin sister named Li Meifeng.
To be precise, they were the “daughter” and “sister” she thought she had. The original owner of this body was not their biological daughter at all, a fact she only discovered just before she died.
After processing Li Zhaodi’s memories, Su Muqing gasped. What kind of blood-sucking leeches were this family? They had practically devoured the girl whole!
Suddenly, she heard voices coming from behind a curtain.
Su Muqing held her breath and listened intently.
“Is the list submitted over there yet?” Wang Xiujuan’s voice was hushed.
“Not yet,” Li Jianguo replied, his voice carrying the irritable drowsiness of someone half-asleep. “The factory is still haggling with the Educated Youth Office. They want to send fewer people and find easier locations. Anyway, I’ve already put Zhaodi’s name down. Our family only needs to send one person, so let it be her.”
Su Muqing felt a chill run through her heart.
“It’s just as well she goes. It saves her eating us out of house and home here. But Lao Li, aren’t they mobilizing people for Beidahuang now? Isn’t there a three-hundred-yuan settlement fee? That’s sixty more than other places! Meifeng graduates high school next year; we’ll need money to find her a job in the city…”
Li Jianguo hesitated instead. “Is that appropriate? If she signs up for Beidahuang, won’t we have to spend money on thick bedding and stuff? Besides, sending her to a place like that… what will the people at the factory say about me?”
To her surprise, Wang Xiujuan’s voice sharpened. “How is it not appropriate! She’s just a girl; carrying that much money would be dangerous for her anyway. Don’t we have thick quilts at home? We can just scrounge up some cheap ones for her. We’ve raised her for eighteen years; shouldn’t there be some return on that? The things her parents gave us can’t be brought out now anyway. This has been a losing business from the start!”
Su Muqing’s fingers gripped the bedsheets tightly.
Return? The original owner was eighteen. She had dropped out of school five years ago to work like a beast of burden for the whole family. Wasn’t that enough of a return? If they weren’t in the city where Li Jianguo and Wang Xiujuan had to save face as factory workers, they likely would have married her off long ago.
Furthermore, Su Muqing learned from the original owner’s memories that her biological family hadn’t given them nothing back then—they had given them ten whole gold bars!
And what did that buy? A lifetime of slaving away? Even after being sent down to the countryside, this family continued to bleed her dry. In Beidahuang, unable to protect herself, she had hurriedly married a man only to suffer domestic violence for the rest of her life.
And now, they were plotting to strip away even the last shred of her value: that meager settlement fee.
Su Muqing felt a fire burning in her chest, but she didn’t act rashly. Instead, she gritted her teeth and waited for the voices on the other side to go silent.
She sat up, her eyes shining with terrifying intensity in the darkness.
She remembered now—in her previous life, she had died from overwork during a shift in the hospital emergency department. Since she had been given a second chance, and since she was now in control of this body, there was no way she would sit and wait for death or let this family have their way.
She had nothing to lose; why should she be afraid!
Just as she crawled out of bed, planning to search for the gold bars left by the original owner’s parents while the two were asleep, a “Ding—” sounded in her mind.
【…Zzzt… Super Great Agricultural Deity System… bound…】
What was that?
Su Muqing froze.
【…System energy critically low… entering hibernation… Host, please begin agricultural cultivation as soon as possible to obtain energy… Zzzt…】
【…Distributing newbie gift pack… Zzzt…】
After those few sentences, which sounded like a radio with bad reception, there was no further sound. Su Muqing had heard of web novels before. She reacted quickly and whispered, “System? System?”
No response.
Could it be a hallucination?
Su Muqing figured that since she had managed to transmigrate, the system might be real too. She tried various ways to wake it up, even trying “Siri” and “Xiao Ai,” until—
“Open newbie gift pack.”
Her vision blurred, and Su Muqing was instantly stunned. She found herself back in the Small Apartment she had bought in her previous life! She was sitting on her own 2.2-meter-wide king-size bed!
Had she transmigrated back?
Su Muqing immediately scrambled out of bed. Without even putting on slippers, she rushed to the door to open it, only to find that even though it wasn’t deadbolted, the door wouldn’t budge. She went to the window and looked out, only to see a cloudless, endless sky. This forty-square-meter Small Apartment seemed to be floating in the air, with nothing else around it.
Disappointed, Su Muqing sat back down, only to notice a piece of paper covered in dense writing on her nightstand, where she usually kept nothing.
She picked it up. At the top, in oversized font, it read: “Operating Instructions for the Super Great Agricultural Deity System.”
So there was a manual after all.
Su Muqing scanned through it and learned that this was an agriculture-based system. She could obtain energy points through planting, tending, and harvesting. However, because the system had used its energy to transport her and her Small Apartment through space, the energy points were exhausted, and it had entered hibernation.
The newbie gift pack was actually a resource refresh benefit for the Small Apartment. Any resource that had once been in the Small Apartment would be randomly refreshed three times a day. However, this function required Su Muqing to pay 50 energy points per month to activate; currently, she only had a 7-day trial.
If the system was successfully activated, it could also issue tasks for Su Muqing to exchange for rewards. But for now, it was just a silent, useless accessory.
Su Muqing sighed. She was a medical student and had worked in the medical field since graduation. She was truly not skilled at farming. Why had she been given an agricultural deity system?
But on second thought, she was definitely going to leave this family of leeches. In this era, one needed a letter of introduction to go anywhere. To escape the Li family, it seemed the only real path was to join the movement to be “sent down” to the countryside.
With a system like this, perhaps life in the countryside would be easier?
The moment Su Muqing thought the words “sent down,” that buzzing mechanical voice rang in her head, offering only three words: Beidahuang.
Hmm? Did Beidahuang have something the system needed?
Su Muqing pondered. While reclaiming the wilderness in Beidahuang was notoriously difficult, later generations described it as a land where “you could club roe deer with a stick and scoop up fish with a ladle.” If the land was that fertile and she had a system, she probably wouldn’t starve to death… right?
Since she had to go to the countryside anyway, did it matter where?
Just then, a crisp ringing sound echoed. The phone Su Muqing had left by her pillow was ringing.